The Headline Is a Lie: The Reality of Funding Women Founders

Right around International Women’s Day every year, a wave of articles show up celebrating the “progress” women founders are making in venture capital. This year the big one looks like this:

Female-founded startups raised a record $73.6 billion in 2025.

Sounds great, right? Buuut there’s a catch.

Remove two companies (Anthropic and Scale AI) and that “record year” essentially disappears. :(

TWO companies are holding up the entire headline.

Meanwhile, all-female founding teams raised just 1.1% of venture capital in 2025. That number actually went down from 2.1% the year before. (I wrote about that, also sad, number in this article last year.)

So depending on how you write the headline, the story is either:

• Women founders are thriving

Or, you know…

• Women founders are still almost entirely shut out of venture capital

Both statements technically come from the same dataset. One just makes the system look better.

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of the founders I work with.

One in particular.

She’s building a company in one of the most complicated data environments in healthcare.

Her days look like most founders’ days:

finance convos
product decisions
team leadership
regulatory hurdles

But there’s a second layer of work she does constantly.

She listens.

She notices when a process breaks.

She catches the moment when something that “should work” in theory clearly doesn’t in reality.

She pushes back on systems that have failed patients for years.

None of that shows up in venture funding statistics, but it’s the kind of work that actually builds companies worth funding.

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The venture industry and publishers love to celebrate outliers. A massive round here. A unicorn there.

A headline that suggests the system is working, but most founders don’t live in those headlines.

They’re doing the slower, messier work of actually building something.

For women founders in particular, the bar is still very different.

You have to be exceptional just to be considered normal.

You have to prove the market twice.

You have to explain risks male founders are rarely asked about.

Sometimes you have to keep a company alive long enough for the system to even notice it exists.

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I love seeing women founders succeed. Truly. It’s the best.

But if we’re going to celebrate progress, we should at least be honest about the numbers. A record year built on two companies isn’t a solved problem. It’s a reminder of how far we still have to go.

Still, I hope you had a great International Women’s Day. We deserve a celebration for all of the hard work!